Heart disease has been researched extensively for
centuries, yet it remains the leading killer of
Americans. Cardiac diseases claim more than 910,000 lives a year.1
The National Institutes of Health approves nearly $2 billion a year in research grants for heart disease2, so why do researchers continue to come up short?

EXPERIMENTS ON ANIMALSCoronary artery disease is the most common cardiovascular ailment in humans
and dominates heart disease experiments. Only humans naturally develop
coronary artery disease, yet millions of animals suffer through painful
experiments in the search for a cure. Dogs, rats, hamsters, and other
animals are locked into laboratory cages and artificially manipulated
to exhibit human symptoms of heart disease. These animals endure:

genetic alterations;

manipulated diets;

manipulation and
invasive monitoring of their metabolisms;

injections with
vitamins, lipoproteins, drugs, and many othersubstances, in concentrated and high doses;

The search for a miracle drug has pharmaceutical companies aggressively
competing for the profits such a drug
would afford. This frenzy has drug companies testing
numerous experimental
medications, killing millions of animals every year. Animals in these
laboratories spend their short lives locked in cages, given test drugs,
observed, killed and dissected. If painful side effects are noticed, they
are logged and nothing more; to administer pain relief would be interfering
with the study.

DANGERS IN GENERALIZING FROM ANIMAL TO HUMANBillions of tax dollars pay for these experiments, yet 4,000 people have
heart attacks every day. Clearly, animal experiments are not providing
the useful and valid information we need. The previous section, Drug
Testing on Animals, conveys the human health risks associated
with the pharmaceutical industry. Here we examine other experiments and
their effects.

Click
here to read why so many humans
continue to suffer and die from heart disease.

REPLACING ANIMALS IN HEART DISEASE RESEARCH

Since animals do not naturally develop most human cardiovascular diseases,
it makes sense to replace the animals in these experiments with accurate
methodologies. Unlike animal-based experiments, non-animal research methods
provide legitimate, valid results that can be accurately applied to humans.